“This pace of job growth means two things,” writes Heidi Shierholz, an economist with the liberal Economic Policy Institute, who says the U.S. economy has a deficit of 10 million jobs: “We are not in — nor are we slipping into — another recession, but neither are we getting the kind of job growth that will bring down the unemployment rate. In other words, the labor market is treading water. This would be perfectly fine if we were at full employment, but with the unemployment rate now above 8 percent for 41 months straight, this is an ongoing, severe crisis for the American workforce.”
NPR
July 9, 2012
For a closer look at the new jobs report, which showed the black unemployment rate up to 14.4 percent, theGrio reached out to Algernon Austin, director of the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program at the liberal-leaning Washington-based Economic Policy Institute.
Thegrio.com
July 9, 2012
The liberal Economic Policy Institute called the sustained high rates of unemployment an “ongoing, severe crisis for the American workforce.”
Associated Press
July 9, 2012
“The labor market is treading water,” said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute. She called it an “ongoing, severe crisis for the American work force.”
Associated Press
July 9, 2012
If you assume Romney intends to implement the Ryan budget—which he has said on multiple occasions—his plan would cost the economy 1.3 million jobs, according to the Economic Policy Institute.
The American Prospect
July 9, 2012
“We’ve been consistently adding jobs,” said Heidi Shierholz, a labor market economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. “But we’ve been adding what we need to roughly tread water. It’s not what we need to dig out. It’s just what we need to hang on.”
Philadelphia Tribune
July 9, 2012
From the Economic Policy Institute comes a report today on public-sector job loss, which as you know is a favored topic of mine. The number of public-sector workers has decreased in this recession from 7.3 workers per 100 adults, an average the United States has maintained since the late 1980s, to something well under that. If we had stayed at the 7.3 figure, and given that population has grown by nearly 7 million since June 2009, that would have meant 1.1 million more public-sector workers on payrolls.
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
July 9, 2012
But Algernon Austin, director of the the Race, Ethnicity and the Economy program at the Economic Policy Institute, attributes the rise in the rate to more black Americans entering the workforce, not to job losses or more people out of work.
CNNMoney
July 9, 2012
Cutting discretionary spending in the debt ceiling deal. The deal the GOP extracted as the price for avoiding default imposed around $900 billion in cuts over ten years. It included $30.5 billion in discretionary cuts in 2012 alone, costing the country 0.3 percent in economic growth and 323,000 jobs, according to estimates from the Economic Policy Institute. Starting in 2013, the deal will trigger another $1.2 trillion in cuts over ten years.
Think Progress
July 9, 2012
The pace of churn is tied to the unemployment rate–which, in turn, is tied to business and employer confidence–and generally moves in the same direction as the headline rate. But while both have shown slow, steady improvement over the past three years, churn has risen much more slowly, as the above graph indicates. That glacial pace of improvement provides a more accurate snapshot of the recovery.
“The unemployment rate is overstating improvements right now because so many people are dropping out” of the labor force, said Heidi Shierholz, an economist at the liberal Economic Policy Institute.
The difference is in the denominators. Unemployment is measured by dividing the number of people out of work by the number working and seeking work, also known as the labor force. When people give up looking for work, they drop out of the labor force, shrinking the denominator and bringing down the unemployment rate more rapidly than it would decline through job creation alone.
National Journal
July 6, 2012